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Red Hat has established and fostered a culture of collaboration among its partner base, which has seen channel partners thrive in today’s competitive environment.
According to Garry Gray, Australia and New Zealand senior director and head of ecosystems at the vendor, Red Hat has a mixture of local partners who either subcontract to, or co-create with, other partners.
“Partners will typically call it out early in the customer engagement, so everybody knows,” he said at Red Hat Summit: Connect Melbourne on 3 September. “These three people are going to compete with one another, or these two are collaborating with one another.”
For MSPs, Red Hat has intentionally built a collaborative approach that fosters sustainable business growth and aligning partners’ strengths, said Gray.
“We can’t do everything and are not going to try and do everything,” he said. “Being able to have an ecosystem of partners and other vendors, and it all integrates together.”
“If you have a mature channel, the channel partners are able to work that out between themselves without having conflict in the channel.”
Being able to facilitate mature conversations to help partners identify gaps and bring them together, ensures that projects leverage the unique strengths of each partner.
“We’d probably be mature enough to have good conversations about how we can exactly play to our strengths,” said Taylor Holloway, chief technology officer at Advent One. “Red Hat is quite good at bringing people together and saying, ‘You guys have strengths in this area. We’ve got a bit of a gap on this project, maybe [someone else] can help’.”
This type of open communication is particularly valuable in smaller and competitive markets like Australia and New Zealand, allowing partners to focus on areas of expertise without encroaching on each other.
“Partners have a clear understanding of each other’s strengths and gaps,” said Holloway. “This transparency helps us avoid stepping on each other’s toes and ensures that we are delivering the best outcomes for our customers.”
For Cameron Tuesley, Integral CEO, it doesn’t matter how a project is finished, but that it is finished with the best outcome for the end user.
“As a partner, we’re not selling a product, we’re selling an outcome for a client,” he said. “Unless we can create that outcome, however we do it, we’re not successful.
“Part of what we do as a partnership, community things, is to try and find the best bits and bring that to the point where we get the outcome.”
Greg Southam, DeployPartners sales manager, noted that the idea of collaboration for service, without necessarily always being commercially oriented, is intrinsic to the channel.
“[In] my experience, we’ve probably looked at what the needs of the customer are, and then how we can jointly both meet those needs,” he added. “If you have a mature channel, then the channel partners can work that out between themselves without having conflict.”
To further recognise the value creation of its channel partners, Gray said the vendor will look to introduce new modules for its channel partner program, which launched earlier this year.
“When we originally launched our partner program we wanted to ensure we recognised the different partner types and their value creation,” he said. “We’ve recognised that other partner types behave differently, so we’re introducing new modules for managed services and creation spaces, with more to come by January 2025.
“It’s about continuing to evolve based on community feedback.”
Lilia Guan travelled to the Red Hat Summit Connect Partner Exchange as a guest of Red Hat.